December 4, 2015

A while back, I told you I was taking Bonnie Christine's Skillshare class on surface pattern design. I had borrowed my grandmother's recipe book with the idea that I would somehow print her handwritten recipes on tea towels. If you missed the original post, you can find it here. Without any previous experience using Adobe Illustrator, I thought it would close to impossible to learn how to navigate the program well enough to create anything but circles and squares. Bonnie, however, is an incredible teacher. Her class covers everything from opening a new document to creating an interesting repeating pattern. And lots of stuff in between. The entire process was fascinating, and I'm now able to do things with Illustrator that I never would have learned on my own.

After I finished the recipe card design, I used the re-color tool that automatically changes the placement of the colors, then selected three different prints to upload to Spoonflower for printing on fabric. Here's how they turned out.

When I first started quilting by machine, I really, really wanted to learn how to quilt feathers. So I drew them on paper until my brain learned to sew them. While I was learning to draw directly in Illustrator recently, I kept thinking of a particular feather design that I've used for a few of my quilts, and ended up making a repeating feather pattern. Here are my new feather fabrics.

It's so much fun to start with a blank computer screen and end up with fabrics that are unique and meaningful. If you ever considered it, but didn't know where to start, just enroll in Bonnie's class -- she'll tell you everything you need to know. And if I can answer any questions about how to get started there, just ask.

I did not realize the recipes were on fabric! What beautiful fabric. If Moda won't then I would try Connecting Threads. If it is the problem that it is not all your art work because of the flowers around the recipes then O My!

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I gave warnings about flood cars entering the used car market. At that time, hundreds of thousands of vehicles were rebuilt and had their titles "washed." But this is really a recurring problem that happens anytime we have a major hurricane season or flooding.

Dishonest people take flooded vehicles into certain states where they can easily wash titles. That action removes any evidence that the vehicle was ever in a flood. Cars with washed titles can then be sold to any dealership across the country that either doesn't know or doesn't care that they're buying a flood vehicle.